CU Boulder students win solar build challenge
Apr. 20—Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that there is a rental unit attached to the house.
A team of current and former University of Colorado Boulder students won first place in the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon Build Challenge for designing and building an energy-efficient, solar-powered house in Fraser.
Teams from the United States, the Netherlands, Chile and Canada competed virtually last week, and the CU Boulder team was named the winner Sunday.
The SPARC house — which stands for sustainability, performance, attainability, resilience and community — is a dream more than three years in the making for CU Boulder graduates and team co-leads Gabriella Abello and Hannah Blake.
As sophomores pursuing engineering degrees, Abello and Blake visited an exhibition of the competition's homes in Denver in 2017 and were "blown away," Blake said.
"It was the most amazing idea that students in college could build real, sustainable, net-zero homes," she said.
Fraser residents Kristen Taddonio and Joe Smyth were touring the same house when they overheard Abello and Blake's conversation and asked the CU Boulder students to call them if they ended up building a house.
"If we didn't have our clients, we wouldn't have finished the project," Abello said. "They were so supportive and such a motivation and that's why it became more than a competition to us. We wanted to make it the best house possible so they could enjoy their future."
The main problems Abello, Blake and the team wanted to address were energy efficiency and affordability in mountain communities.
The SPARC house is a compact 1,176 square feet, powered by a 7.6 kilowatt array of solar panels and is already selling energy back to the grid.
The house cost $439,000 to build, though the team factored in utility savings and income from an attached rental unit, as well as different financing options, to make it affordable to someone with an annual income as low as $64,000.
The house is also built on a modular design, so that once 15 prefabricated wall panels were shipped to Fraser, the team and homeowners put them together in two days, fast enough to navigate temperamental mountain weather.
Taddonio and Smyth are now living in the SPARC house, which is the best feeling of all, Abello and Blake said — closely followed by winning the build challenge.
"With COVID over the past year, we were just trying to get to the finish line and make something we were proud of," Abello said. "Seeing the house perform so well was so validating, and we were so ecstatic to hear the final results."
The SPARC house is the result of the efforts of more than 30 CU Boulder students and faculty since 2017. Blake said she hopes it serves as a model for the housing industry.
"We care that the industry sees our house and that it serves as an example that cold climate, all-electric design works," she said. "Sustainable construction is viable right now, and we hope the industry sees that and things start to move in that direction."
